EASILY Level Up Your Code Reviews With This Tip ANYONE Can Do

as a new software engineer you're probably not taking full advantage of your code reviews and if all this sounds very new to you because you're just getting into software engineering and you're not even sure what language to start with stay right to the end and I have a link for you that will help you make that decision now before I jump into my strategy I'd love to hear from you in the comments what challenges you currently have with your code review process alright let's consider this scenario you've been working hard to fix one of the first bugs that you were assigned in your new role as a software engineer you've spent hours looking through the code trying to understand it you've gone and started making changes to all of the spots that you think need to be adjusted in order to correct this bug after spending hours and hours on this and manually testing it all out you're very confident that your code change has actually fixed this bug so now it's time to put this code up for a code review you go ahead and push your code up to be reviewed by your teammates after no time at all your notifications are completely blowing up because you're getting comments on your pull request you can feel your anxiety Rising because you know that those comments are going to be about things that you need to go correct on your code review if that sounds like a familiar experience then I think this strategy is going to work really well for you and the strategy itself is actually quite simple there's a lot of different things that we look at in software engineering that have to do with iteration cycles and finding a chance to be able to reduce the amount of time that goes into each iteration from my experience pull requests and code reviews are actually no different than this so if we rewind a little bit and consider that scenario that I was just walking us through one of the things that I was trying to call out was how much time you were spending on fixing things and in fact with that example was trying to illustrate was that you had spent a lot of time trying to make things correct you had tested things out yourself and then put it up for review to have someone else basically be able to tell you that they're not totally happy with it so the strategy that we can use here around iteration cycles and your code reviews is actually to be able to put up a code review sooner so that people can provide input earlier on in your development now this might look different from Team to team or whatever system you happen to be using at work but in some cases this might be a draft pull request and in other cases you might be able to push up a branch of code to a remote endpoint and have other people be able to review this regardless of the actual implementation that you need to use to get this done the concept here is that you have code that's up and available for your peers to review early this will allow you to get feedback from your peers about what type of solution you're implementing what code you're touching and if you're on the right track for being able to solve the problem in a way that's congruent with the rest of the code that's being developed there might be patterns in the code that you're not fully aware of or perhaps the patterns in the code have changed more recently and you weren't taking advantage of the latest and greatest way to go do something now it's also worth mentioning that this strategy does not have to be used with a formal code review or necessarily putting any code up into a pull request system or anything like that really all that I'm trying to do in this strategy is encourage you to have conversations about how you're trying to implement a solution early so if we take a step back from the actual code review process what this strategy could actually look like is you trying something out locally on your machine coming up with an approach for how you think you would like to solve the problem and then being able to make some time with another peer on your team to walk through what your solution looks like of course every team is going to be operating differently so again I wanted to propose this as an alternative because it's still in the spirit of that early feedback loop so if your team does not leverage things like draft pull requests or people don't want to be reviewing really early code in your pull request system that's okay and that's not at all for me to decide but as I mentioned you can actually work around that entire thing just by having conversations with other people on your team about the solution that you'd like to implement now there are tons of other things that we can look at with respect to code reviews to make sure that you're getting the value you need out of them but in this particular video I just really wanted to focus on the shorter iteration times for you to get feedback before you spend too much time potentially going down the wrong path so hopefully you can try that strategy out and see for yourself how much time it ends up saving you thanks for watching and as I mentioned at the beginning of this video if you're just getting started out and software engineering and you're not even sure what language to start with then this video right here is going to be a great one for you to look at